The Best Australian Poems 2011 Read Online Free Page B

leaves.
    The ball hovers above the beach, eclipsing the sun a few inches.
    He eases back
    he becomes sand.

ms marbig No. 26 16
Julie Chevalier
    another team needs restructuring
    her boss seeks rejuvenation
    he likes a shiny new worker
    Â 
    in glossy black accessorised with chrome
    she’s the facilitator who holds the coalface together.
    strong jaw   teeth without stains
    she click-clacks his documents
    Â 
    past your use-by date , he
    exposes her in public
    whips her back into an angry V.
    her rusty assistants jam
    printers, shredders, fax machines

We begin building that which cannot collapse because it will have to have been built as if it had already fallen
Justin Clemens
    Gary was being extremely annoying with the glue-gun, as a parody
    buffoon gets stuck to the routine and then can only separate
    by ripping off his own souls while his kaleidoscopic pantaloons
    spiral outta control like a flotilla of combi-vans
    driven by acid-hippies through the violet hill-deserts of ma mind…
    do you too smell the blood of a nationalised energy foundation?
    You have to keep the abecedaria flying, or, if not flying, at least floppily erect!
    (uh-oh, here comes that dynamic psychotherapy again, Gwyneth,
    you’re for it now! It’ll make you springen, springen wiff ’appenis fer sure,
    as the flashers go off with epilepsy-inducing arrhythmia.)
    Please don’t bother me with your body any longer, I’ve enough
    of orgasms and orgies to last me ten thousand lifetimes,
    and it’s a better bet to go pale over a flaccid biopic of a pallid poet,
    because my wound-dark nerve-endings are just sooooo sensitive they quiver
    at the merest trilling of those much speculated-upon boronic microparticles –
    Fargh! your vulgar disinhibiting fanfare can be only dreadful noise to me!
    Â 

Picasso
Sue Clennell
    Wrapped in bulls and balls,
    squiggle me macho.
    Seek out my women,
    how I make their
    bums, breasts and bellies
    fold up into furniture,
    gore them into dripping tears.
    I am potted, baked dry,
    moulded by España’s rough hands.
    If you are woman don’t catch the
    attention of my one red eye.

Four Lines by Ezra Pound
Jennifer Compton
    The New Zealand poet settled to his coffee at the Astoria in Lambton Quay
    kindly hunched against the bitter wind at an outside table because although
    he hated us when smokers ruled the world he pities us these days of leprosy.
    Â 
    He spoke of our late mutual friend from Lecce who, whilst living in Venice,
    paid his respects to Ezra Pound on occasion – as one would – the poet sunk
    below the waterline into the clarity of incommunicado and monkish accidie.
    Â 
    One day the poet raised his head and spoke – four lines – from out the deep
    of his mistake – four good strong tough lines that anyone could remember
    and the man from Lecce did and they became the punchline for a story.
    Â 
    But but – I said. I have read those lines, unattributed, in a book of verse.
    Four good, strong, tough lines that were worth remembering, and so I did.
    Such Antipodean chutzpah to plagiarise Pound, his brilliant rottenness.

Metamorphosis
Michael Crane
    The mother is now the child
    and the daughter scolds her
    for driving late at night
    and the mother cowers
    on the sofa half afraid of her.
    Â 
    Her disgruntled child seems
    taller and stronger than she remembers
    and the daughter goes into the kitchen
    to cook some beetroot broth
    and they sit in the lounge room
    Â 
    quietly together, not a word spoken
    and then the mother nods off
    to sleep watching television
    and the daughter carries her
    to the bed and watches her mother
    Â 
    dream and she stands over
    guarding the bed like some Roman sentry
    and then finally she goes to bed to plan
    the next day and this is love
    in a strange disguise, but love nonetheless.

Adenocarcinoma Triolet
Fred Curtis
    They’ve found something